Top 100 Quotes About American Culture
#1. American Christianity is based more on a godless culture than it is the word of God.
Paul Washer
#2. We're trying to infuse a little good into the American culture. Love God, love your neighbor, hunt ducks. Raise your kids, make them behave, love them. I don't see the down side to that.
Phil Robertson
#3. Every white person in this country-and I do not care what he or she says-knows one thing. They may not know, as they put, "what I want",but they know they would not like to be black here.
If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.
James Baldwin
#4. The second is that the American people tend to oppose whoever they see as the aggressor in the Culture Wars - whoever they see as trying to intrusively impose their values on other people and bullying everyone who disagrees.
Yuval Levin
#5. American Psychological Association, the girlie-girl culture's emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls' vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, risky sexual behavior.
Peggy Orenstein
#6. Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture.
Robert Crumb
#7. It's no secret that Cuba is a typical Latin American culture in that it has a fair amount of homophobia. Homosexuals have been notoriously persecuted under Fidel's government.
Rachel Kushner
#8. Canada could have enjoyed: English government, French culture, and American know-how. Instead it ended up with: English know-how, French government, and American culture.
John Robert Colombo
#9. There's a thing called the 'One Drop' theory in African-American culture, which is if you have one drop of black blood in you, you're black.
Keegan-Michael Key
#10. Elvis [Presley] had a stepstool, if you will, to success because he came from the dominant culture. They identified with him. Michael Jackson had to come further and go deeper into the pit of possibility of American democracy and of cultural expression.
Michael Eric Dyson
#11. And this fear that US models are replacing everything else now spills over from the sphere of culture into our two remaining categories: for this process is clearly, at one level, the result of economic domination - of local cultural industries closed down by American rivals.
Fredric Jameson
#12. This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness.
Nick Joaquin
#13. The shaking of American culture is no sign that God has given up on American Christianity. In fact, it may be a sign that God is rescuing American Christianity from itself.
Russell D. Moore
#14. I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
Marilyn Hacker
#15. Education is transformational. It changes lives. That is why people work so hard to become educated and why education has always been the key to the American Dream, the force that erases arbitrary divisions of race and class and culture and unlocks every person's God-given potential.
Condoleezza Rice
#16. Am I Latin? Am I American? What the hell am I? I love my culture and I'm very proud of my culture.
America Ferrera
#17. There are aspects of Asian culture in my work, but it's really rooted in an American experience - transcendentalism, '60s counterculture, punk rock.
Fred Tomaselli
#18. I have real fears for Cuba based on the South American experience. Where you have had such a stern regime, as Fidel's [Castro], there is no culture of politics.
John Gimlette
#19. Today's Democrat Party believes that distinct American culture is corrupt, biased, racist, sexist, prejudicial, homophobic. There is nothing about it they want to preserve.
Rush Limbaugh
#20. I'd like to state that Spike Lee is not saying that African American culture is just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish. Culture is for everybody.
Spike Lee
#21. All of my Polynesian counterparts in the NFL with roots in American Samoa understand how the values embedded in our South Pacific culture - community, hard work, perseverance, respect - contribute directly to our success.
Troy Polamalu
#22. The noun phrase straw man, now used as a compound adjective as in 'straw-man device, technique or issue,' was popularized in American culture by 'The Wizard of Oz.'
William Safire
#23. Americans are interesting creatures. They criticize those who speak their language with a slight accent but have no issues with butchering most other languages, my name included.
Santino Hassell
#24. It is not about promoting a distinct and great American culture because today's Democrat Party does not believe in one.
Rush Limbaugh
#25. This determined bias against religion, especially Christianity, is clearly evident when viewed against the religious heritage of American culture as revealed in the Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 452. 1892.
Mathew Staver
#26. There's more emphasis on art and culture in Europe than there is in the United States and I think that a lot of American directors and writers are just trying to copy other American horror films, they don't pick up much in the way that European filmmakers do.
Wes Craven
#27. I was an American girl; I possessed what our culture valued most-independance and blind courage.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#28. I think in American culture, we put value on economic success but tell people you don't have to be economically successful to be happy.
John Hodgman
#29. I grew up thinking of myself as an American but also, because of my parents and the Iranian culture that was in our home, as an Iranian. So if there's any such thing as dual loyalty, then I have it - at least culturally.
Hooman Majd
#30. Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.
Rebecca Solnit
#31. Coming up in the African-American culture, we were taught that we belonged to the universe and society was wrong in the way it dealt with us. We had to learn to express and affirm values not from the winning position.
Bernice Johnson Reagon
#32. A lot of contemporary American culture makes its way to this county. Cuba is not some gray, isolated backwater. This is a happening place.
Assata Shakur
#33. Jamestown changed the world in many ways, but perhaps it shaped our nation most profoundly the day Africans arrived. I can't think of a more relevant place to talk about the issues facing our community today than the place where African culture became American culture.
Tavis Smiley
#34. Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#35. Back home, this Catholic kid was accustomed to a Protestant culture's condescension, but here he could see for himself the world-historic glories of Catholicism ... [A Catholic American soldier's reaction to seeing St. Peter's Basilica during WWII.]
James Carroll
#36. We are an impatient culture and an impatient electorate.
Dick Couch
#37. I think there's a lot of anesthesia being - that's been pumped into American culture, the mass media television, various forms of entertainment, and the illusion of wealth that we now understand to be an illusion as well as the illusion that America is a world power.
Parker Palmer
#38. Teenagers, especially girl ones, seem like the perfect canary-in-the-coal-mine characters to me. They capture American culture and its perversion, its hypocrisy - how absorbed we are with youth and beauty and sexualized imagery, for instance, while preaching abstinence and modesty.
Antonya Nelson
#39. Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#40. Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way.
B.W. Powe
#41. 'SNL' is this part of American culture with a certain timelessness to it.
Thomas Bangalter
#42. A 'death mirror' held up to American culture - Brando, bikes and black leather; Christ, chains and cocaine. A 'high' view of the myth of the American motorcyclist. The machine as totem from toy to terror. Thanatos in chrome and black leather and bursting jeans.
Kenneth Anger
#43. the most lovable of exceptional American qualities (is) our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class, even if we aren't, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class.
Charles Murray
#44. Some Christians worried about a faith that was so embracing as to be meaningless, that exalted not the Almighty so much as the American way of life. When civil religion bleached the challenge from faith and left behind a watery patriotism, there was room for concern.
Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy
#45. Is there a sharper commentary on American culture and the world than The Simpsons?
Anthony Bourdain
#46. I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.
Albert Einstein
#47. in Chicago in 1893. While they introduced the American people to such new words as reincarnation, nirvana, and Karma, the new religions also echoed the creed of self-reliance that had been an article of faith in American religion and culture for almost a century.
George Pendle
#48. [Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.
Bill Bryson
#49. Spare the rod and spoil the Memorial Day rotisserie.
Brian Spellman
#51. The [Wal-Mart] corporate culture lagged way behind many other American corporations in terms of making progress on women's issues, and that had a lot to do with being based in northwest Arkansas.
Liza Featherstone
#52. When their voices didn't reach my ears,
I rebelled against my own skin
too young to realize that without their
stories I would starve.
Kiana Davis
#53. Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the "New England idea"-could no longer serve.
Alfred Kazin
#54. What I dislike about movie culture is that it often presents a parable of our problems - but the issues are all straightforward and the people are either nice or they're not. In real life, everyone falls between those perimeters, but not many American films operate in that grey area.
Julian Fellowes
#55. The Afro-American experience is the only real culture that America has. Basically, every American tries to walk, talk, dress and behave like African Americans.
Hugh Masekela
#56. Psychologically, Japanese women depend largely on each other. In their sex-segregated society, they could be criticized for living in a female ghetto, and yet they have what some American feminists are trying to build, a "women's culture" with its own customs, values and even language.
Kittredge Cherry
#57. I'm African-American by my culture, not by my color. Race does not exist.
Terry Crews
#58. Surrounded by the self -sufficiency of American culture, we can convince ourselves that we have what it takes to achieve something great.
David Platt
#59. 'Night Watch' itself is a very Russian movie. It's impossible to imagine this kind of movie somewhere else: a movie with a depressing ending, a lot of inexplicable storylines, strange characters. It's a Russian reflection of American film culture.
Timur Bekmambetov
#60. In Chinese culture, it wouldn't occur to kids to question or talk back to their parents. In American culture, kids in books, TV shows and movies constantly score points with their snappy back talk. Typically, it's the parents who need to be taught a life lesson - by their children.
Amy Chua
#61. I read an anecdote once about a woman from another culture who came to the United States and began to introduce herself as "Busy." It was, after all, the first thing she heard when meeting any American. Hello, I'm Busy - she figured it was part of our traditional greeting,
Kevin DeYoung
#62. I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans. Generally speaking Indians don't read books. It's not a book culture. That's why I'm trying to make movies. Indians go to movies; Indians own video recorders.
Sherman Alexie
#63. I got interested in the American culture war back in 2004, and it's one of the only growth stocks I've ever invested in.
Jonathan Haidt
#64. I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of 'Idiocracy' and 'Borat,' without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture.
Adam McKay
#65. [N]ow that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#66. Hatred of popular culture was to define a generation of American intellectuals and their claim to a superior sensibility.
Anonymous
#67. If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.
Sven Birkerts
#69. If America is to be strong in the future, Americans must see America as home, not divided by race or region. Build American jobs for the future and come together with compassion to solve problems.
Phil Mitchell
#70. Even though I'm English, I've all my life been heavily exposed to American television and culture in general.
Dominic West
#71. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#72. There is no more effective way to radicalize American Muslim youth than for political leaders to make public displays of prejudice against all Muslims. Suspicion will undermine their sense of identification with America and alienate some from both the culture and from politics.
Miroslav Volf
#73. Anything that's ever gotten on the charts as a result of "American Idol" or "The X Factor" in the UK. It's born out of karaoke culture. It's been a long time coming, but it's absolutely affected radio.
Johnny Marr
#74. soon after we arrived in the U.S., Baba started grumbling about American flies. He'd sit at the kitchen table with his flyswatter, watch the flies darting from wall to wall, buzzing here, buzzing there, harried and rushed. "In this country, even flies are pressed for time," he'd groan.
Khaled Hosseini
#75. I'm just a singer, Elvis was the embodiment of the whole American culture.
Frank Sinatra
#76. It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture.
Hans Hofmann
#77. As long as American liberals are going to keep announcing that they're embarrassed for their country, how about being embarrassed by our public schools or by our ridiculous trial lawyer culture that other countries find laughable?
Ann Coulter
#78. If the American Negro is to have a culture of his own he will have to leave America to get it.
Paul Robeson
#79. There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.
Jess Row
#80. A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.
Camille Paglia
#81. As a newcomer to America who learned to 'speak American' by watching movies, I firmly believe that to change the politics of immigration and citizenship, we must change culture - the way we portray undocumented people like me and our role in society.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#82. What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export.
David Simon
#83. It wasn't until I came to New York and started to see the African American community, but also the Ethiopian community here, and started to eat the food, started to understand the music. I said, you know, I got to go and understand the culture. So me and my sister went.
Marcus Samuelsson
#84. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement.
Michael Eric Dyson
#85. The Hispanic culture is finding its way into the American culture. Places like Miami are going to be centers for that influence - places like Los Angeles and, certainly, cities in Texas.
Randy Falco
#86. If you get down about the state of American culture, just remember there are still more public libraries in this country than there are McDonalds.
David McCullough
#87. To me, politics is culture. I became a journalist, and later a filmmaker, to get to know my new country and my volatile place in it as a gay, undocumented Filipino-American.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#88. Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction.
Tony Kushner
#89. In the mid-1980s, there was a grassroots desire for American culture. Maybe it was not a definite harbinger to what was to come in terms of the fall of the Soviet Union, but it certainly gave a heads up to the global merging of the retail culture.
Brian Shactman
#90. It's a very generous culture, American culture. I know you can't generalize 300 million people, but everyone I've met here has been so lovely to me.
Jacki Weaver
#91. I was so tired of his being even-keeled in the face of all that was upsetting and ugly and illogical.
Sara Novic
#92. The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.
Ishmael Reed
#93. It's because we are so flooded with American culture that we're startled when we see ourselves up there on the screen.
Yahoo Serious
#94. There's been this perception that Europeans still hold on to, that they discover the real talented ones in American culture and give them proper credit and that's not true anymore - it used to be. A lot of jazz musicians would get respect in Europe.
Andrew Bird
#95. You have the United States, and you have Mexico, and then you have this Mexican-American thing which is this third culture, which I like to call Aztlan.
Linda Ronstadt
#96. American culture is not about experiencing our shame, it's about denying it. It's been that way our whole history.
Chris Jordan
#97. We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.
Northrop Frye
#98. I think it's that thing of growing up all the time watching American movies and listening to American music. It hits you in a way that's a lot purer because you are not in that culture that you're watching.
Ben Mendelsohn
#99. The highways of American cities are an enduring testimony to our acceptance of ugliness
J. Rufus Fears
#100. I sometimes wonder whether our churches
living as we do in American death-denying culture, relentlessly smiling through our praise choruses
are inadvertently helping people live not as much in hope as in denial.
Mark Galli
